The work is called verification. Mara has been doing it for two years.

She sits at a terminal on the third floor of the Accord’s district office on Meridian Street, which is a building that used to be something else — a bank, she thinks, or a government registry, though the distinction no longer means much — and now has the particular blankness of places that stopped being anything in particular during The Contraction and never found a reason to start again. The light in here is even and constant. It comes from panels in the ceiling that approximate daylight in seventeen-minute cycles, rising and falling so gently that you stop noticing it within a week and never notice it again.

Her job is to check the outputs. Not the algorithm itself — she doesn’t have clearance for that, and neither does anyone in her division — but the downstream effects. Discrepancies between what the model projected and what the sensor data actually recorded. She processes them in queues. Flags them. Closes them.

Most of them are nothing. The model is very good.

Today’s queue contains forty-seven items. She works through them the way she always does, methodically and without urgency. A heating unit in Block 7C reporting lower consumption than projected: sensor drift, close. A population movement count in Sector 4 that doesn’t reconcile with housing data: census lag, flag for quarterly reconciliation, close. A micro-credit decision in Sector 2 flagged for secondary review: income source ambiguously classified, forward to Assessment, close.

Sector 9 appears at item thirty-one.

ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING — SECTOR 9
Timestamp: 06:22, March 16, 2047
Alert type: persistent heat signature, decommissioned zone
Coordinates: 51.4812° N, 4.4021° E
Signature duration: 847 days
Classification: unregistered land use (probable)

She reads it twice. Eight hundred and forty-seven days. Over two years of daily readings, consistent and recurring, and this is the first time it has reached her queue. She pulls the satellite overlay. The images are sixteen months old, but they’re enough: a rectangular patch of green, approximately forty by twenty metres, sitting inside the perimeter of a decommissioned rail yard in a district the Accord rates at 0.31 relevance. The edges are too regular to be accidental. The distribution is deliberate.

Someone is growing something in a place the system has categorised as empty.

The protocol is not ambiguous. Unregistered land use in a decommissioned zone requires a Compliance flag and a site assessment request, to be reviewed within ninety days, which may result in a remediation order, which may or may not be executed depending on the district’s current allocation status.

Mara sits with the flag open for a long time.

Outside, a tram moves past the building. She can hear it through the glass — not the sound exactly, but the vibration of it, passing through the frame of the window and into her hands.

She closes the flag.

Marked: sensor anomaly, non-organic origin probable, no further action required.

She moves to item thirty-two.

She does not think about why she did that.

She is very good at not thinking about things.